Hydrophobic association hydrogels with excellent mechanical and self-healing properties

Hydrophobic association hydrogels have attracted great attention of many researchers and been widely utilized in tissue engineering stents, drug delivery carriers, wound dressings, and biosensors as intelligent materials due to their excellent mechanical and self-healing properties. Here, we mainly introduced different mechanisms on hydrophobic association hydrogels with high mechanical and excellent self-healing properties. The mechanisms included not only hydrophobic association, but also synergistic effect with latex particles, nanoparticles, electrostatic effect, metal complex, hybrid crosslinking and double network. Based on these achievements, moreover, we forecast the hydrophobic association interaction would exhibit more meaningful influence on assisting the performance of hydrogels for wide applications of biomedical, industrial, agricultural fields.